Boris’s crime strategy: the heir to Blair

Prime minister Boris Johnson outlined his proposals for reforming criminal justice in England and Wales last week. Johnson’s plans included hiring an extra 20,000 police officers by 2022 and creating 10,000 new prison places. He also promised to spend £100million on improving prison security. More controversially, he proposed to expand stop-and-search powers to allow police to search members of the public without authorisation from a senior officer.

This all sounds very familiar. Johnson’s plans have echoes of New Labour. Tony Blair, as home secretary under John Smith, promised Labour would be ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. This was an attempt to portray New Labour as the new party of ‘law and order’ and to take electoral ground back from the Tories.

Spending on law and order rose by around half a percentage point of GDP between 1999 and 2006. The police benefited from a 21 per cent real-terms increase in funding between 1997 and 2005. Overall, Labour presided over a decrease in the official crime rate by 35 per cent between 1997 and 2007.

But an independent audit into Labour’s performance on crime, published in 2007, found that the reduction merely reflected an existing downward trend in the crime rate, and that increases in police spending made very little impact. New Labour also muddied the waters by encouraging large numbers of offences to be disposed of by way of a caution. That meant that cases could be treated as ‘concluded’, even though the evidence in support of the case had never been tested in court.

The ‘tough on crime’ policies arguably contributed to New Labour’s electoral success. But Labour’s approach to justice in the long term is more questionable. Notably, New Labour’s spending had no impact on public trust in the justice system. In 2013, a survey commissioned by the Ministry of Justice showed that public trust in the criminal-justice system had not changed significantly between 1996 and 2013.

The Ministry of Justice’s research also called into question the simplistic notion that all the public wants is more arrests and tougher sentencing. While respondents consistently believed that the courts were ‘too lenient’ in punishing criminals, they tended to underestimate the severity of the sentences that were actually being handed out in British courts. Also, when presented with specific, hypothetical cases, most respondents’ sentencing preferences were quite lenient.

The research also looked at public attitudes to the legitimacy of the police and the courts. It found that ‘feeling an obligation to obey the police and feeling aligned with the moral values of the police were the most important predictors of expressed willingness to cooperate with the police and criminal courts’. In other words, the legitimacy of our justice institutions depended on people feeling as though their morals aligned with those of the justice system. An effective programme of criminal-law reform could bolster public confidence by focusing on what is being criminalised and why.

There is also a great deal of research that suggests the public is open to quite radical criminal-law reforms. According to a recent YouGov poll, twice as many Brits are in favour of legalising the recreational use of cannabis as are opposed. This could be a prompt to think about a radical programme of decriminalisation to alleviate some of the problems in our prison system, particularly overcrowding.

The problem is that both mainstream parties wrongly behave as if public attitudes to law and order are reducible to how many people we are sending to prison. Britain already has the highest prison population in Europe. Ten thousand extra prison places will not bolster public trust in the justice system if the wrong people are being sent to fill them. Radical criminal-justice reform should start by considering all of the offences on the statute book and asking whether we need them.

Jim Lawrie

Andy Bolstridge

21st August 2019 at 4:21 pm

Ironically not sending people to prison (or having a effective deterrent) increases the need for prisons. If your justice system involves giving offenders a slap on the wrist and telling them not to do it again,they aren’t going to care a fig and will carry on, and their feral mates will also commit crimes, safe in the knowledge that (even if caught) they’ll receive no punishment that matters to them.

Net result: more crime. if we were tougher, and by that I mean more effective at providing a deterrent, fewer people would consider criminal activity (particularly anti-social crimes) in the first place. Perhaps we should make sentencing a more community driven affair, an offender could be sentenced by the people living in the estate he commited the act in an online poll. You can imagine offender’s reactions to that!

But the idea of reform being legalising cannabis (always the go-to example for some reason) is deeply naive.

Jim Lawrie

21st August 2019 at 7:19 pm

During The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the near certainty of being caught and the dire consequences meant crime was negligible.

The left, who do not live in high crime areas, think it is for them to decide for those who do. Their decisions are based on their romanticised, and imaginary, view of working class life.

John Reic

21st August 2019 at 12:12 pm

Just to point out Blair was shadow home Sec under John Smith not home sec,

It was ironic Thatcher said the doubling of crime in the 80s was nothing to do with poverty , homelessness and unemployment, all going up

And had won that argument , right up to James Bulgers death, yet Blair’s quote tough in the causes of crime took away personal responsibility

But at the same time as well as appealing to the liberal left blaming the government for crime rather than individuals, also became a state authority to have poets to deal with it

The only new Labour Home Secretary who said poverty didn’t cause crime was Charles Clarke and Blair sacked him( for other reasons)

John Reic

21st August 2019 at 12:08 pm

The fact that the brexit party are in between 7-12% in the polls shows that Boris to go for this Sort if Domestic law policy , isn’t appealing To Brexit party voters many of whom are right wing old labour,

The Tories are defending No Deal so the reason brexit party voters haven’t switched to the Tories isn’t they gone think the Tories are committed to brexit

Theres a lesson for labour if it was pro policing but not full of poverty causes crime style gimmicks but face police piers to police rather than follow the McPherson report view of thought crime

Then labour could win brexit party voters, by being pro police, but not having new labour- , McPherson report , hate crime/ Thought crime